But again, not for ever. Remember that we are talking particularly of RFC
2047 here. If in 50 years time you come across an old email with RFC 2047
in its headers, and it is 25 years since the last MUA that understood it
had died, all is still not lost because you can still read the ascii and
decode it by hand.
I honestly don't know whether 25 years is enough. I think document format
obsolesence is a big problem - along with media format obsolesence.
Yes, I can read WordStar documents that I wrote in 1978, but only because
I can write code and WordStar used a very simple format. Most people don't
have tools that would let them read such documents effectively.
Keith